


Alternian Propaganda Circus

by lookingdead



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, M/M, Medical Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 16:38:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookingdead/pseuds/lookingdead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dave crash lands on Alternia and is thrown into a traveling troll circus where Karkat has already been stuck for the past three sweeps, spreading good cheer and fear of the empire to all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alternian Propaganda Circus

**Author's Note:**

> So it's time for Xero's Self Indulgent Fic With Very Little Plot of the month. This is a pretty spontaneous thing that just kind of happened, but I've really wanted to write an evil circus au for a while so?

Consciousness bleeds into your brain like something molten and boiling. 

Your ears are stuffed with liquid cotton and all you hear is the muddled buzz of cicadas. Light streams in between your eyelids and it's like staring straight into an entire star system's worth of fire. There's nothing there to see, just endless, burning, light. You shut them immediately. Your shades are missing from your face and it feels like you're on a swaying sea, being tossed from wave to wave. It's almost soothing. The cicadas hum like music without melody. 

You hear some crinkling and feel something slide over your chest, something like a blanket but not that soft. Your eyes crack open without a thought, concerned of what it might be or what might be moving it. It certainly wasn't you. Nothing but scalding white fills your vision, though, flaring and burning colorless colors into your vision before you can snap them shut again. Phosphenes paint the insides of your eyelids as the crinkling and the movement and the cicadas all stop. 

Everything stops and you wash into the sea at the back of your mind.

\---

The next time you open your eyes, you are met with nothing but darkness and you think that you may have gone blind. 

Your head feels like it's full of knives, and you hear cicadas again. Or, perhaps they're not cicadas. It sounds like buzzing and purring and maybe even like people. You don't know. You're not sure it matters. You want it to stop. It's getting loud, tremendously noisy buzzing and purring and hissing and spitting and growling and maybe even talking. It shakes the insides of your ears and beats against your throbbing skull like relentless waves in a storm. Loud and angry, maybe insects, maybe lions, maybe pigs. You can't tell what they are.

It hurts your head. It hurts. It's awful. It hurts so bad.

And, God, what are they? They could kill you just with just their voice, and whatever is making those noises is not a friend to you. You should get out of here. But where is here? You can't see anything, nothing but black. And your head hurts and your chest, your chest, every time you try to breathe, just take one breath, it's cut in half by a sharp pain in your ribs. You don't even want to try to move. You're pretty sure your entire ribcage is filled with glass.

Something knocks into you suddenly, something that feels like a person, and it sends all sorts of sharp shards of pain running through your nerves. All the noise and chirring just gets louder and louder, it sounds like growling, arguing, insects the size of lions.

Giant insects that you can't see. What great company to have upon waking up from...from....

You try to make out how many there are. You think there might be three or four. They're getting so loud and your head is pounding so much that you can't really focus on specifics. It seems like there's just a sea of loud and angry noise, beating and beating and beating against your head like a hurricane. It almost sounded like talking before, but now there's nothing even vaguely cognitive about it. It's squawking and screaming and growls and roars and you're pretty sure that if you don't get out of here, whatever is making those noises is going to kill you.

And they're so close.

They're right next to you. One of them slammed into you. Where are you, even? 

You start to move your arm, slowly, slowly, so as not to cause any attention to yourself. You stare into the darkness before your eyes and begin to pick out bits of light, and the dips and wrinkles of what you're realizing is probably a tarp. You pull your hand up slowly, slowly, and it aches with every tiny little movement and your head is wracked nearly to the breaking point by the growls and hisses being thrown around you.

You hear something fall and break, a loud crash, a few more things falling over, thunderous banging and roaring growls. You try to breathe evenly, despite the sharp pains in your lungs. Your heart is wild with panic, trying to find some way to escape your surely doomed chest. You try to be calm, though. You've got to be calm if you want to get out. You pull your hand up your stomach, up your tattered pilot suit, and apparently over some stinging cuts that did not want to be brushed.

You bring your palm up to touch the tarp covering you and run it up next to your head to find the edge. Your hand is shaky, weak and half asleep. You gently, gently, ever so slowly, amidst the growling and snarling and hissing and garbled yelling, pull the tarp back just a bit so that you can see.

Just as you do so, all the noise, all the growls and hisses cease. They break off into quite sudden silence, letting it fill up wherever you are with an incredibly heavy nothingness. It's as though you've just been ripped from the sun and thrown into a void. Your fingers tremble and you peer into what is at first nothing but white light again. You don't know where to look to identify your surroundings.

The silence is making you afraid to breathe, though. The silence makes you afraid to move.

You blink and try to make sense of what you're seeing. 

Slowly you realize that the white you're looking at is not the white of a light, but the white of a curtain. It sways a bit and the golden light of a lamp seeps through its fibers. You're not at the right angle to make out the proper shapes of shadows, but you can see one moving in the corner of your vision that corresponds with the a sudden clang that dismantles the silence.

There's a noise that you swear almost sounds like a voice.

You hear footsteps and movement. Your heart is still in panic mode and your chest still fights every single breath you take. Your veins are filled with ice and your heartbeat is in every inch of your body, in your fingertips, in your feet, in your throat, in your throbbing head. You become suddenly very aware of the fact that you're laying on a table, your senses grabbing everything they can to tell you where you possibly might be. 

You're on a table, under a tarp, behind a curtain, and something is moving around where you can't see them. You have apparently sustained some kind of head injury, and chest injury. Your left leg doesn't feel like it's in great shape either, but you can't feel it much at all so you really can't tell. Something's moving around, though. Things are being rearranged, things made of metal and plastic, heavy things. Maybe it's a person moving them, but something is telling you that it's not.

Okay, quick. Think. How did you get here? What's the last thing you remember? Quick. Quick. What do you remember?

First, who are you? State that back. That's a good test of how severe a head injury is. (Good, you remember stuff about head injuries)

Alright, your name is Dave Strider. You pilot various spacecraft. You've been deployed for eleven months and have not been to Earth since. You come from Huston, Texas. You were raised by your brother. Everything was normal until these weird ships came in like some horribly cheesy alien invasion movie.

You were with a larger fleet on your way to find the homeworld of the invading species. Something got your ship screwed up.... You remember flashing lights, alarms telling you that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, oxygen was leaking, pressure was falling, you were basically fucked up beyond all recognition. You were trying to figure any way out of it. Your co-pilot, Jade Harley, a fantastically intelligent woman with long black hair and olive skin and a brain made for nothing other than exploring and building and solving problems, was doing the same. You didn't have enough power left to escape the gravitation of a nearby planet that you'd somehow drifted too close to. You were levels of fucked you never thought you'd be as a child wrapped in sheets in an apartment in Huston. 

You prayed to a God you never believed in as you entered the planet's atmosphere and then there was an incredible amount of light and heat and you tried your best to land, you really tried your best. You had no idea where you were, though. Your coordinates must've been fucked long before then. You weren't anywhere near where you were supposed to be. You just had to land, somehow. You weren't even sure if this planet was solid or if it had vaguely breathable air or if it was even sort of close to kind of habitable, but maybe it would be. Maybe, maybe. There was nothing else you could do besides try to land. 

It took six minutes and 12.4013 seconds to land. You vomited twice. 

There was green, though. You remember that there was bright, luscious green and you were screaming and falling straight for it. Alarms were shrieking in your ears and you were doing everything you could to try and get the ship to survive so that she could survive so that you could survive you tried you tried you fell the alarms the alarms-

The curtain in front of you is wrenched open and the sudden unfiltered glow of a lamp dredges you from your thoughts. You freeze and your eyes follow up the shadow-coated form of what you are thankful has two arms, two legs, and in general looks like the silhouette of a human. They loom over your table, their features painted in darkness as the lamp spins a halo over their tangled and messy hair. 

Their hands come down to roughly tear the tarp off of you body, and in the process, they pull the curtain back further. You see quite quickly that this is absolutely not be a place you want to be. From where you're laying, you can tell you're in a tent, specifically what looks like a circus tent with gold and red stripes. It's full of some frightening looking machines and computers and wires and, honey combs? All of which is dirty and stack haphazardly and you're not sure what fell over before because there's just so much stuff everywhere. The place is a mess of rust and computers and medical equipment. 

You forget your injuries for just long enough to try something dumb like sit up in a panic, sending fire blazing down your spine to engulf your ribs and burn your chest and lungs. You fail to stop yourself from groaning in response. You hear a hiss from the person messing with the tarp, and look at them better this time as they press a large, pavement grey, clawed hand down on your chest to force you to lay back down.

You properly look up into their face, now in proper light, and you know that you are in the absolute worse possible place you could be in. Their face looks fairly human, but the skin is as grey as an elephant's, and their eyes are huge and black with golden sclera. Their hair is a matted, greasy, mess of shadows and there are two tiny orange horns buried in their twisted locks. 

They stare straight down at you and open their mouth to speak, and all that comes out from between crooked yellow fangs and a lashing black tongue, is garbled, growling, hissing, spitting, chirring, and clicking. They sneer, pulling back black lips to reveal black gums full of more teeth then could ever really fit in their mouth properly. They make a few more noises, a lot more growling this time. Their tongue is as black as tar and their top row of teeth never fully stay behind their lips.

"What the fuck are you s'pose to be?" you spit back at them, not thinking first. 

They lean their face in closer to yours and bring their hand up to hold you by the jaw. They blink once, twice, turn your head to the side, and pull on your ear. They turn you back and start scrutinizing your eyes. They make a few chirring noises that may or may not be words and lean in to get a very good look at your eyeballs, pulling your lids about with their thumb experimentally. 

They seem fairly human, but not. Five fingers, one of which is a thumb. They're curious, and their face is human, if not somewhat off. The nose is sort of weirdly flat and wide. Not flat like nonexistent, but more in a way that makes you think they resemble a sheep. They might even be a human in a costume trying to scare you. Actually, that's probably what they are.

So you bring a hand up and grab their face back.

They don't like that very much and pick your head up in their grip and slam it back down on the table. You yell as blinding pain devours your head and skull and brain. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Ow, fuck, shit. Ow, fuck. You groan and swear and you shouldn't be showing this much weakness but, fuck, that hurt, fuck, fuck, fuck, that hurt so much. 

Next you feel your arms being banded together tightly. 

Shit. Shit. You need to get out of here. You need to just ignore the pain and get up and leave. You try to sit up and obviously, but they're not having that and push you back down. You take that opportunity to throw your now tied up fists as hard as you can into their abdomen as they lean over you. You can feel that it was weak, though. Your muscle power is non-existent. They heave slightly, but it doesn't get them off of you. 

It does make them growl, though, and it does make them bare their awful yellow teeth at you. If those things are fake, this is one good costume. 

They're not much bigger than you, though. It shouldn't be this hard to just get them off so you can run away. You can feel their claws digging into your wrists as they try to hold you still long enough to finnish binding your hands. You try to put up as much of a fight as you can, but they're laying heavy on your chest and every movement you make is sending waves of sharp pain crashing into your ribs. Your struggling only does so much, especially when they decide to properly pull themselves up onto the table and position themselves on top of you so that you can't throw them off. 

"How about you don't do that? Hey, seriously, fuck..." It comes out as a wheeze. It hurts so much. They're sitting on your almost definitely broken ribs and you can't do anything besides try to stop making pained groans. It hurts, fuck. Get them off. Jesus christ. Get them off. Get them off.

They spit out some more nonsensical noises and dig into the pocket of their labcoat, which looks like it's been washed about as often as their hair or that grubby sweater they're wearing. They pull out a metal cylindrical object and grab your face again. They start looking you over carefully. They pull down your eyelids and you learn very quickly that the little cylindrical object is a flashlight, as they pour light into your retinas. Then they decide to stick their fingers under your lips next, and pull them back, like you're a dog and they're examining your teeth at the vet. 

They pull your jaw down and force your mouth open. They shine the little flashlight and make a pretty disappointed or possibly disgusted face. They let go of your jaw afterward.

"Please just get off..." you choke out, trying your best to sound either annoyed or calm. Instead, you just sound desperate. You're pretty sure that they can't understand what you're saying anyway. 

They make a weird noise that's somewhere between a purr and a hiss. It's much softer than anything else that has come out of their mouth so far, and comes with a weird couple of soft pats to the side of your face. They start looking over your head after that. The pain in your chest is fucking unbearable, though. Just get them off. Just fucking get them off. You can't take this shit. You can't take it. You fucking can't.

"Get off, fucking get off, please... Fuck, please, where the fuck am I? God, please get off," you ramble, absolutely pathetically. You can't even breathe. You can't fucking breathe. You can't. You can't. 

They just make that purring noise again and tap your face. They dig into their pockets again and pull out bandages and you don't even care. You don't even care. It hurts so much. It hurts. It hurts. You can't even keep your eyes open anymore. Get them off.

You can't even make noises relatively close to talking anymore. All that comes out is empty air.

You feel them wrap up your head in bandages, lifting it up when your neck isn't going to do it for you. In the time it takes them to do that, you completely lose your grasp on what is real and slip back into the black ocean where you can't feel any pain. 

\---

You wake up completely strapped to the table, your shirt and jacket missing entirely and replaced with a load of tightly rapped bandages. 

Your first thought is where the hell is Jade Harley. What the hell happened to her? Is she in the same situation? Is she alright? Did she survive? Where the hell is Jade Harley? Where is the rest of your fleet? Where are you? Where? Where? Where?

Your next thought is the awareness that the troll is still working on you. That's what those are called. They're trolls. You've never actually seen one. You've blown up their ships, bright red and easy to target, but you've never seen one up close. You've heard them described as huge grey-skinned creatures with tall curving orange horns and black hair and glowing yellow eyes. They're described like monsters, some kind of uncanny valley human-gone-wrong types of monsters that tower over you with clubs and knives and guns and teeth and horns and claws, like demons, like horrors, like destroyers.

This one looks like they're barely bigger than you are, though, and you can barely see their horns amidst their hair. Their teeth are pretty terrible, sure, but nothing like you've heard. And their eyes are big, but definitely not in a creepy way. They've also got these big pointy ears like a bat's. They look like a puppy version of what you've heard. Maybe this one's just really young, or something. 

You're an experiment for a teenage monster troll alien beast.

And you have no idea where your co-pilot's gone.

But that means you found the planet with trolls on it. Your coordinates might've been unaligned with the rest of your fleet, but you found the troll's homeworld. You found it. You absolutely have to get out of here. You have to get out of here, find Jade, and call your captain, call John. Get back to your ship, run, run, run. Get out. Have to get out.

The troll grabs your arm and they've got a needle and a rubber tourniquet. You're tied down and can't do anything about it as they tie up your upper arm and start looking for a good vein. That's interesting, though, that they know where to look. 

That's very interesting. 

You can't stop them from sticking the needle into your skin and pulling out a vial's worth of blood. All you can do is hope that they sterilized it first, but you feel like they probably didn't. You think that it's probably in your best interest not to fight too hard, keep all of your methods of escape subtle. 

They start filling up another vial of blood.

They start talking, and this time it actually kind of sounds like talking. It's still full of growls and chirrs and clicks, but it's less of a mess. It almost sounds like german, in a really weird way. Or, no... not german. Russian? Maybe icelandic? You're not really an expert on language, here. It sounds like speech now, anyway. 

They chitter about something. You're not sure if they're talking to you. 

"Yeah, that... that sure is something," you say, pretending to respond.

They look up at you for half a second and start filling up a third vial. 

Then they say something in response.

"Oh yeah?"

They give you a little set of grunted word-noises.

"Very interesting."

They respond. There's quite a few snaps and purrs in there. 

"Yeah, I feel that." 

They respond with more snaps and purrs.

"Yup. Yeah, man, I know."

They stop filling up vials and pull the needle out of your arm and immediately push down on it with a cotton ball. They undo the tourniquet and wrap a bandage around your forearm. The whole time, they keep talking and it almost seems like they're making the same noise over and over again. You think you hear the same pattern of snaps and purrs at least three times. 

"Shit, bro, I hear you," you say. 

Then they just say one quick string of clicks and purrs. 

"Oh, fuck, that is some deep shit you're in."

You realize that they've started staring at you pretty intensely. They repeat the same short string of clicks and purrs.

"Sounds pretty intense."

They repeat themselves again, this time pointing at their own face. Then they repeat the noise again, much slower and more drawn out. 

"Klrrrrrrrkt," they say. They start making some over embellished facial expressions with each individual noise. It sounds like a quick "click purr click overlapping with slightly different click".

"Kk. Rlllrrrrrrrr. Kt."

They stare at you very intensely. 

"Kuh... rrrrr..... ket?" you say back, pretty sure they're trying to get you to attempt to repeat the noise. 

"Kk. rrrrrrlllrrrrrrrrr. Kt!" they say. You got it wrong apparently.

"Kurrrket?"

"Kkrrrllkt."

"K.... Karrrrket?"

"Krrrrkt!"

"Is that your name?" you ask, as though they have any idea what you're saying.

They put their face in the palm of their hand and let out a long jumble of noises that are starting to sound a lot more like growls again.

"Krrrrrkt," they say. "Kk. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrlllll. Ktttt."

"Karrrrrrrkat?" You try to roll the r's to get it to sound as close to that noise as possible. It's probably their name. They keep pointing to themselves when they say it. 

"Krrrrrrrrktttttttt," they say. They're getting exasperated, but you're not sure how they're expecting you to make those noises properly.

"Right. Gonna call you Karkat, then."

"Krrrrrkt," they say again. "Krrrrkt.

"Karkat."

"Krrrrkt."

"Karkat."

"Krrrrkt."

"Karkat." 

"K. Rrrrr. Frkkkerrrr. Kt!"

"Karkat."

They growl loudly and turn away from you, muttering to themselves for quite a few seconds, until they come back to look you in the face again. This time they gesture to you and say something else. A long, long, rambling mile of something else.

They talk for a legitimately impressive amount of time, making hand gestures, pointing at various things in the room, pointing to themselves, to you, to nothing, sometimes just flailing around their hands dramatically. Their tone and gestures heighten in intensity, quickly flying skyward toward an elaborate crescendo of faster and faster coming words. You have no idea what they're talking about, but somewhere inside of you, you know that their life goal must be to be a saturday morning cartoon villain. 

They keep going until a loud screeching roar comes from somewhere outside the tent and they freeze up, mid gesture. A very startled look of fright freezes onto their face, holds their spine in place, as a loud, high, cackling noise erupts from behind the canvas walls. They straighten up and shout something back in response, something that probably would've been just as long and elaborate if they weren't immediately interrupted again. 

Then there is an argument going on between this troll and one with a slightly higher voice that you cannot see. After a few seconds, the troll just outright leaves you, pushing the tent doors apart and stomping outside to continue the argument. You hear a third voice mix in, or at least you think you do.

You take the chance to try and leave without another thought.

You take a look at the straps over your chest. They're just leather belts with metal buckles. There are four of them. You realize that through this whole time, you really haven't been in much pain at all. Your chest is still definitely aching, and so is your head, but it's nothing like before. You're bandaged and cleaned and your leg is in a makeshift stent. You hope you can walk on it well enough to get out of here. You'll question all of it later.

You start first by moving experimentally, shifting underneath the bindings. You don't have a lot of room to move. They're pretty tight. Maybe you could somehow just shimmy out of them?

And then your opportunity is shattered into completely irreparable pieces as the troll comes back in, flanked by another with longer hair and sharper horns. This one is skinny and a bit taller than they are, with sharp features and pointed glasses that are as red as cherries. Their hair is just as inky black and greasy looking, but it's straight and falls to their shoulders.

This one strolls in on light feet, a sharp-toothed smile stretching out their features into a disturbing sight. They walk straight passed the other one, Karkat, who stomps around with hunched shoulders. The taller practically skips up to your table and leans on it. They bring their face straight down to yours, sparing absolutely no personal space at all. 

Karkat is still trying to talk to them.

Their nose is nearly touching your forehead and they hiss something that sounds suspiciously like a "shut up". You feel their inhales and exhales on your skin and, shit, they're sniffing you. They sniff your entire face and down your neck and make a few chirring comments to the other one. They snap back and forth at eachother during the whole time that this one decides to thoroughly acquaint their nose with your flesh. 

They abruptly pull away from you and whirl around to speak to Karkat again. Karkat responds with a bout of growling that is cut short by the skinny one's snapping. This second one is made of bones and angles and grey skin and spines and points. They turn back around a second later to say something to you. 

"I have no idea what either of you are saying, please stop trying to talk to me," you say. 

You are mostly trying to convince yourself that you aren't completely terrified of both of them. 

Karkat is digging around in a rotten cabinet on the other side of the tent, doing their best to avoid the computer desk covered in a mess of medical equipment and other bits of junk that has been tightly crammed into the small space. The cabinet is full of clothing, fairly extravagant and frilly and somewhat dirty looking clothing, all of which is bright red and silver and black. Everything here looks so not-alien.

They stand up in the cabinet to reach the very top shelf and pull down a box. They hand the box off to the second troll, still talking to them endlessly. They open up the box and pull out a large metal ring with their long bony fingers. As soon as they do, Karkat reaches up to scratch their own neck under the collar of their sweater. 

The sharp-horned one looks at you and says something, smiling wide and hellish the whole time. Their teeth look like two rows of finely crafted knives and you can far too easily imagine them tearing into flesh and skin and ripping and wrecking and shredding. They hold the ring up to show it to you, then they press something on it to open it up and strap it around your neck. 

Then they reach up to Karkat, who appears much less excited, and pull down their sweater collar to show you that, hey, look, you have matching metal collars. How nice. Their expression melts from unenthusiastic into fairly irritated very quickly. They jerk themselves out of the other troll's grip. Then they start searching through the clutter on the desk until they find a notebook and pen. 

They start scribbling something down and the second one peers over their shoulder the whole time. The two make a few comments back and forth with eachother while Karkat writes. Then they show you the page and it's covered in grey marker scribbles that construct a crude drawing.

You're not entirely sure what it means.

They point with the pen, directing your attention to the person-figure and then at you. That's supposed to be you, then. Alright. 

"Shit, bro, we've got Leonardo DaVinci tying me to a table to take samples of my sweet, delicious flesh. Oh, hell, how do I deal with this information. Please undo my bindings and allow me to find the nearest restroom so that I don't soil your beautiful bdsm table out of the pure excitement coursing through my blood stream from being in the presence of such an esteemed artist. Fuck, is that a tree or a broccoli or an expl...osion...."

You trail off upon the realization that the picture is illustrating you leaving the tent with the collar on and exploding.

Oh.


End file.
